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Many businesses should be able to get full-fat fibre connectivity for a lower price as of next year, when BT Openreach will cut its wholesale pricing for FTTP-enabled areas and introduce its FTTP-on-demand option, also at the lower cost.

The faster light can travel through a fibre the lower the potential latency of data transmission. In comparison, the solid silica glass fibre optic cables in use today propagate light at some 69 percent the speed of light in a vacuum.

The difficulty with using hollow-core fibres to transmit data to date is that the cables have struggled to maintain the combination of low loss, wide bandwidth and mode-coupling characteristics needed for high capacity data transmission.

The researchers said they have now achieved an acceptable balance of these factors, recording a loss of 3.5dB per km, and using a 160nm bandwidth channel to transmit 37 WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) channels at 40Gbps, which they claim is 1.54 microseconds/km faster than over conventional fibre.

Apart from the general benefit in faster transmission, wide bandwidth, low latency signal transmission links are in demand to increase the rate at which algorithmic financial trading can take place and as fast interconnects between components inside future exaflop-scale supercomputers.